CMO Interview Series: Brayden Clark

During our journey of creating HireCMO, I've had the privilege to (virtually) meet some of our time's most creative chief marketing officers; both fractional and full-time. When it comes to paid media (fancy term for paid ads on social media and Google), the CMO that stood out to me the most, was none other than Brayden. A true legend from the hills of Calgary, Canada.

Brayden has some of the most rad insights in the marketing space, and I wish I could ask him 10 more questions as part of this interview. But I guess we'll have to do a second version of this. (Great for our SEO btw)

I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.

‍Eliza

Brayden, man of the hour. Awesome having you on. Let's kick things off with a bang!

Q1 - Tell the audience a little about yourself and the kind of marketing/growth results you’ve delivered in the past!

Brayden

Hey, thanks for having me on! The pleasure’s all mine.

I’m a little bit of a strange marketer. I come from both an entertainment and coding background—I was originally a professional drummer, and have led and worked on a lot of custom development projects—so I’ve found myself working largely in the Tech and Entertainment space.

So myself and my cofounder Kaitlyn, usually find ourselves working with brands in Robotics, VR, Crypto, and Motorsports.

As for projects I’m most proud of: we recently ran a 5 month fractional CMO/CTO project where we took a new startup from 0 product and 0 clients, to having a sellable product, generating solid revenue, and raising at a $1.2M valuation.

We’ve also pulled of some great branding packages for brands in crypto and VR that I’m really proud of.

Eliza

That's totally unheard of. 5 months and all that impact?! You're a rare breed.

Q2 - One thing I respect a lot about you is your founder energy / entrepreneurial flair. What have you built so far and how did you transition into marketing exactly?

Brayden

You’re too kind! 

I actually got into marketing through my first real attempt at starting a business. I launched an archery dodgeball brand out here in Calgary. We let people run around and shoot each other with NERF arrows. 

That got me connected into the startup scene, and I just saw that people needed a lot of help in the design and development space. I’ve got a background in both, so I started managing it for teams on contract. 

After a while it just made sense to spin it out into a company. So I teamed up with my cofounder Kaitlyn, and we launched Chaos Inc.

So really: I fell into it.

Eliza

That's such a random story haha. Interesting how you just stumbled into it almost by chance, and now here you are being a fractional CMO for companies. That's pretty rad.

Q3 - You’re one of the few marketers I’ve spoken to who’s had a fun mix of music, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in their life. Talk to us about how you transitioned from all that into marketing!

Brayden

It’s been a weird ride! That tech and entertainment background helped me a lot here. I know how to speak the language of these guys, and had a marketing skill stack that most of them didn’t have. So I naturally slotted into positions of helping them with marketing.

It becomes a bit of a network effect once you’re there, so it’s easier and easier to keep working with similar brands.

Those clients actually formed the basis of our marketing company, Chaos.

Eliza

Q4 - So you currently run your own marketing agency and are also a fractional CMO with us at HireCMO. Are there specific topics within marketing that you love getting nerdy about? What excites you about them?!

Brayden

Oh yeah. Go To Market strategy.

Figuring out how to take a new idea or concept to market in the most effective way is *chef's kiss* fantastic. It’s also the perfect blend of marketing and tech.

You’re trying to build the right product, for the right customer, for the right price, in the right timeline, and tell them about it in the right place with the right systems. It’s amazingly good fun: and a blast when you pull it off.

Eliza

Q5 - Fascinating. A lot of marketers I speak with, struggle to know when to make the jump from a tactical marketer to a marketing leader. What was your personal “YES!” moment when you knew 100% that you were skilled enough to transition into being a CMO for companies/startups? 

Brayden

Honestly, I’m just a little full of myself in my work. I always have been—and I’m fully aware of it so I’m pretty good at keeping it under control— but I generally look at things with a “Ahhh, I could do that” mentality. 

So when I saw an opportunity when a team needed my exact skillset in a leadership role to get to market, I jumped at it, and it worked.

Now: I’ve got enough of a background working with startups, teams, and marketing that I wasn’t going into it blind or under-skilled. I brought with me a whole booklet of lessons I’d learned from working with startups that had failed. 

But that project: where I just saw all of the lessons I’d learned come together and work beautifully, was what flipped the switch. I now knew I had the skills to do CMO work.

—

One thing's for certain, you can't beat Brayden's energy, enthusiasm and skillset in the paid media space. We ran out of time, but I was going to ask him about his love for brand strategy and scaling paid media channels. It's incredibly powerful what founders can accomplish in 2023 by working with talented folks like Brayden.

10 years ago, we were all following waterfall models, spending 20 hours on making logos and writing long marketing copy... and now thanks to marketing systems/automation (Brayden's a geek at this), cheaper ways to test your product offerings and being able to hire fractional CMOs on monthly subscriptions.. what's your excuse for not going to market successfully? :)

After having interviewed and spoken with 100+ founders and marketers as part of building HireCMO, I’ve realized that the most competent founders are those who have a strong coach/mentor/team to guide them towards product market fit and beyond. And to be honest with you, that's one of the reasons we brought on Brayden to our HireCMO squad.

If you would like to work with talented CMOs like Brayden, feel free to have a chat with us and I’ll personally take care of you. You can always use the search function on our site if you're looking for something specific! Until next time!!